Fictions

by Wade C. Jennings, Wade C. Jennings

Fictions is an anthology of short fiction designed for college courses in which the short story and the novella are the principal subjects for discussion and writing. This collection of one hundred stories include some of the most memorable work of the world's classic and contemporary writers. Many of the selections are masterpieces that have fascinated students of literature fdor generations. Others, while less well known, possess similar virtues and may thus achieve a comparable position within our literary tradition. The collection includes many stories of new voices. The textbook also illustrates how the various steps in the writing process -- keeping a journal, brainstorming, restricting a topic, planning your essay and developing an outline, writing the first draft, and revising the first draft -- lead to a successful paper.

Genres: Fiction, Anthologies

Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

Reviews

[David Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first edition of this collection of stories for classroom study. The book is typically large, given literature readers for college classes. Trimmer and Jennings have selected mostly very famous stories commonly used in fiction classes in the 1980s. The major authors are here - Poe, Hawthorne, Conrad, James, Kafka, Joyce, Chekhov, etc. There are a couple of authors who get multiple stories, and often in those cases Trimmer and Jennings choose one famous story and one or two less known ones. They do this with Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Walker, for example. They try for some variety, with a couple of light stories, a few science-fiction stories, one detective story (Sherlock Holmes, of course), and some experimental fiction (John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Alain Robbe-Grillet). It is an overall good selection of top-notch stories. Despite some of the variety, there is an overall heaviness to the selections that can get a little wearing. Because this is a textbook for an introductory literature course, the book has an introduction explaining how to write a paper about fiction. After each story, the editors provide some questions for conversation and study. In general, this book gathers enough serious fiction for three anthologies.